ory on
Athena and Earth."

"You insist in thinking we'll do as Gerns would do," he said. "We won't
delay to do any posturing. We'll have a large fleet when we leave Earth
and we'll go at once to engage the Gern home fleet. I thought you knew
we were going to do that. We're going to cripple and capture your fleet
and then we're going to destroy your empire."

"Destroy the Empire--_now_?" Narth stared again, all the gloating gone
as he saw, at last, the quick and inexorable end. "Now--before we can
stop you--before we can have a chance?"

"When a race has been condemned to die by another race and it fights and
struggles and manages somehow to survive, it learns a lesson. It learns
it must never again let the other race be in position to destroy it. So
this is the harvest you reap from the seeds you sowed on Ragnarok two
hundred years ago.

"You understand, don't you?" he asked, almost gently. "For two hundred
years the Gern Empire has been a menace to our survival as a race. Now,
the time has come when we shall remove it."

* * * * *

He stood in the control room of the battleship and watched Athena's sun
in the viewscreen, blazing like a white flame. Sigyn, fully recovered,
was stretched out on the floor near him; twitching and snarling a little
in her sleep as she fought again the battle with the Gerns. Fenrir was
pacing the floor, swinging his black, massive head restlessly, while Tip
and Freckles were examining with fascinated curiosity the collection of
bright medals that had been cleaned out of the Gern commander's desk.

Lake and Craig left their stations, as impatient as Fenrir, and came
over to watch the viewscreen with him.

"One day more," Craig said. "We're two hundred years late but we're
coming in to the world that was to have been our home."

"It can never be, now," he said. "Have any of us ever thought of
that--that we're different to humans and there's no human world we could
ever call home?"

"I've thought of it," Lake said. "Ragnarok made us different physically
and different in the way we think. We could live on human worlds--but
we would always be a race apart and never really belong there."

"I suppose we've all thought about it," Craig said. "And wondered what
we'll do when we're finished with the Gerns. Not settle down on Athena
or Earth, in a little cottage with a fenced-in lawn where it would be
adventure to watch the Three-D shows after each day at som